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Voting Issues

BURLINGTON, N.C. – On Monday, Sept 30, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against North Carolina, stating that its new package of voting laws was “highly restrictive.”

The suit is geared toward four pieces of Bill 589, passed in August – including the requirement of photo ID, cuts to early voting, elimination of same-day registration in the early voting period, and the exclusion of counting provisional ballots by voters who voted in the wrong prescient. The lawsuit would also seek to place North Carolina back on a federal “pre-clearance” list.

But North Carolina is not the only state the Justice Department filed against. In August, it sued Texas because of the state’s new laws surrounding redistricting and its photo ID provisions.

So when did all of this disagreement over voting laws begin? Possibly in June, when the majority-Republican Supreme Court voted to remove a provision in the Voting Right’s Act that required eight states to get permission before changing election procedures – North Carolina and Texas were on that list.

While some support the DOJ’s suit against North Carolina and other states, Director of the Elon Poll, Dr. Kenneth Fernandez, said the new changes are just a result of a power shift.

“For the first time you have a Republican governor and Republican-controlled legislature, and not just a small majority, but a super majority, in both houses,” Fernandez said. “That’s when republicans said, ‘We can do a lot of things that we’ve wanted to do for a very long time, but we haven’t been in power.’”

In fact, according to the most recent Elon Poll, most voters supported the new photo ID laws because it doesn’t seem like much of a burden. But does requiring a picture ID at the voting booth actually prevent voter fraud like legislators said it will? Most say no. In a report, it turns out that voter fraud is actually very low during elections.

“Who’s going to do that,” Fernandez said. “You’d have to know Kenneth Fernandez is registered at this precinct and he hasn’t voted yet, and I’m going to go and vote for him and vote for my candidate, well that would be easily caught.”

He said it’s not really the voter ID laws that will have the most impact on turnout, it’ll be the provisions that reduced early voting and same day-registration.

According to George McCue from the North Carolina Board of Elections, the early voting period will be reduced from almost two-and-a-half weeks, to only one-and-a-half weeks. But the number of hours will stay the same – voter locations will stay open for longer, just for fewer days.

Although there will be cuts to the early voting period, Director of the Alamance County Board of Elections Kathy Holland said people should not worry.

“Our hope is to be as proactive as we possibly can to make sure our voters know what’s going to be required of them,” Holland said.

She said that shortening the early voting period may be inconvenient now, but people will just have to be patient with the new changes.

“Anytime you have changes and you’re going through the process with as many people we’re involved with,” Holland said, “there’s going to be complications.”

“I think this is one of the best things that has actually happened about voting rights in NC,” Fernandez said. “It makes us think about things, it makes us appreciate, it makes us fight for our right to vote, and that’s good for politics.”